Get Your Yoga On

Challenge yourself to practice yoga five minutes a day with this inclusive beginner’s guide to 30 foundational yoga poses and sequences—for everyone and every body.

Yoga is a healthful, stress-busting, powerfully life-changing practice that is truly for everyone! You don’t need to be young, flexible, or athletic to do yoga—and you don’t need to spend hours on the mat. You just need to be yourself and commit to practicing at least five minutes a day.

Here, renowned yogi Kino MacGregor presents a basic, self-paced plan to encourage you to try each of the thirty foundational poses included and slowly build a regular yoga practice. Through step-by-step instructions, over two hundred color photographs, and modifications for different body types and abilities, Kino makes yoga possible at whatever level you may be. By challenging yourself for just five minutes a day, you will end up learning a strong, basic yoga sequence that you can grow and adapt for a lifetime of yoga.

Why five minutes? Well, five minutes is the minimum amount of time that you need to reset the habitual patterns of the body and mind. It’s also a measurement of time that even the busiest person can fit into their day. You can definitely practice more than that. But so many people think they have to give two hours to a sweaty full-on practice or it’s not worth practicing at all. I know many yogis and fitness enthusiasts who stop practicing when their life situation changes due to work or family; they just didn’t have the time to commit to a lengthy practice. Or new students to yoga can often feel overwhelmed by the idea of doing yoga continuously for an hour or more. It feels like a marathon, and it may not fit into your life. But everyone can squeeze five minutes into their schedule.

Studies show tangible health benefits to exercising for just five minutes a day. A study published by the American College of Cardiology examined more than fifty-five thousand adults, looking at exercise habits over fifteen years, and found that people who were even slightly active had much stronger hearts and lungs and lived up to three years longer as compared to those who didn’t exercise at all. Even modest physical exertion can improve your mood and help you sleep at night.

Yoga is more than just physical fitness. It is a spiritual path of inner transformation that works slowly, over many years, to change the operating system of your brain. Not only does the practice teach you to calm your nervous system in the moment of practice but also how to apply the same tools amid difficult life situations. Instead of operating from the fear-based mentality that assumes the world is a big competition for a limited few slots at the top of the heap, you learn how to be at peace with yourself wherever you are in the grand scope of life. Much like getting a new operating system changes everything about your computer, yoga practice—even for as little as five minutes a day—installs a new operating system in your brain that gives you a whole new paradigm.

Kino MacGregor is a Miami native who is happiest on the beach with a fresh coconut and a poet at heart who always stops to smell the flowers. She is the founder of Omstars—the world's first yoga TV network. With over 1 million followers on Instagram and over 600,000 subscribers on YouTube and Facebook, Kino's message of spiritual strength reaches people all over the world. Sought after as an expert in yoga worldwide, is an international yoga teacher, inspirational speaker, author of four books, producer of six Ashtanga Yoga DVDs, writer, vlogger, world traveler and co-founder of Miami Life Center.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kino_MacGregor